The War Of 1812

From the Smithsonian website comes this interesting account of the war of 1812 which cemented United States’ independence from Britain. They’ve been regretting it ever since, poor things.

As the article explains here in Britain the War of 1812 isn’t that large a part of our history simply because we were more engrossed with defeating Napoleon at the same time.

By contrast, the British historiography of the War of 1812 has generally consisted of short chapters squeezed between the grand sweeping narratives of the Napoleonic Wars. The justification for this begins with the numbers: Roughly 20,000 on all sides died fighting the War of 1812 compared with over 3.5 million in the Napoleonic. But the brevity with which the war has been treated has allowed a persistent myth to grow about British ignorance. In the 19th century, the Canadian historian William Kingsford was only half-joking when he commented, “The events of the War of 1812 have not been forgotten in England for they have never been known there.” In the 20th, another Canadian historian remarked that the War of 1812 is “an episode in history that makes everybody happy, because everybody interprets it differently…the English are happiest of all, because they don’t even know it happened.”